The elevator groaned like a dying animal as it clawed its way to the fourth floor. Militech's corporate rats always nested at the top—even their backstabbing sessions needed a pentview. The "conference room" was a rotting carcass of Militech's former glory—three offices smashed into a 120-square-meter graveyard of peeling drywall and severed power lines. Flickering fluorescents spat static, their jaundiced glow reflecting off the chrome-plated skulls of ten Maelstrom goons lining the walls like vultures. The air reeked of mildew and scorched circuitry—a half-dead coffee machine-turned-jammer hissed in the corner, spewing steam like a broken coolant pipe.
At the table's head sat Juanito Marquez, late 40s, Militech middle-management smugness incarnate. His suit screamed "I expense-report human souls," and his smirk was a masterpiece of corporate entitlement. Beside him loomed a Maelstrom lieutenant, her face replaced by a chrome dome etched with glowing circuit patterns that pulsed like a failing heartbeat. Her augmented optics locked onto Carl, lenses whirring as they spat out a threat assessment:
TARGET-ANALYSIS
Age: 17–18 (meat still soft, probably still gets carded for synth-whiskey).
Armor: Subdermal plating (forearm reinforcement, street-grade Kevlar overlay).
Weapon: Arasaka JKE-X2 Kenshin (stolen, likely off a dead corpo—typical gutter trash).
Carl's subdermal-armored forearm twitched. The readout wasn't wrong—but they missed the killswitch coiled in his nerves.
Blanca took the seat opposite Juanito, her leather jacket creaking like a coffin lid. She'd swapped her usual Militech tactical gear for civvies—black turtleneck, slacks, boots polished to a mercenary's shine. A pathetic attempt at "diplomacy." Her knuckles whitened around a Militech-issue datashard, and Carl's retinal implant caught the micro-tremor in her jaw. Not fear. Rage.
"Relax, Blanca," Juanito purred, steepling fingers crowned by a Militech signet ring. "We're just… realigning mutual interests." His Spanish accent dripped honey laced with rat poison.
Blanca's voice was a monowire slice. "Your price."
"All assets. Resignation. Disappearance." Juanito leaned back, savoring the words. "Everything. Down to the lint in your Militech-issued socks."
Her fist hit the table. A shard of paint flaked off, drifting onto her lap like confetti from a corpo funeral. "Your leverage isn't worth half that."
Juanito's laugh was a scalpel on bone. "Still think torching those transport logs saved you? I funneled you those Maelstrom deals. I let you play smuggler while I cloned every file." He tapped his temple, the signet ring flashing. "You're a seat-warmer, Blanca. A diversity hire with a fancy degree squatting in my chair."
Carl tuned out the Militech pissing contest. His HUD tagged threats:
11 Maelstrom (Blanca's intel swore 10—classic Militech arithmetic).
4 by the exits, Saratogas slung like chrome-plated jewelry.
1 preening vulture begging for a Kenshin-shaped lobotomy.
The Maelstrom thugs eyeballed him, optics flickering with dismissive static. To them, he was gutter trash—a baby-faced merc packing stolen Arasaka iron. They missed the predator's stillness in his stance, the way his subdermal plating flexed under his sleeve.
Juanito wasn't done. "Check your recorder, Blanca. Jammers have been live since you stepped off the elevator." He spread his arms, embracing the decay. "This? A dead zone. Just you, me, and—"
Blanca moved.
Militech-issue Malorian steel flashed—a blur of polished obsidian. The 3516's muzzle kissed Juanito's forehead before his smirk could fade.
One trigger pull
The hypersonic round punched through bone and corporate ambition, exiting in a spray of gray matter that redecorated the Militech eagle on the wall. Juanito's corpse slumped sideways, his smirk fossilized in rigor mortis—Night City's favorite punchline.
The gunshot's echo still hung in the air when the room erupted. Blanca's hair-flip had been the signal—subtle, corporate, rehearsed—but her execution was pure Night City. One moment, Juanito's corpse slumped over the table, his smirk preserved in death. The next, ten Maelstrom thugs lunged for their weapons, chrome fingers twitching toward Saratogas already humming with lethal intent. Carl's neural interface flared, time dilating as combat protocols overrode human hesitation.
Seven targets. Twelve rounds. One breath.
He'd spent three nights mainlining The Good, the Bad, and the Cyberpsycho, its braindance gunplay etching itself into his synapses. Now, the Kenshin sang in his grip, its electromagnetic coils screaming as hypersonic rounds tore through the room. The first round punched through a Maelstrom grunt's ocular implant, liquefying the optic nerve before exiting in a spray of synthetic fluid. The second and third rounds found home in the throat and sternum of a chromed-out berserker mid-lunge, his chainblade clattering to the floor as kinetic force snapped his spine.
Carl pivoted, the Kenshin's recoil vibrating through his subdermal-armored forearm. Two more rounds spiderwebbed the cranial plating of a scavenger reaching for a grenade belt, the explosive ordnance detonating in his grip and painting the walls with shrapnel. A sixth Maelstrom goon caught a round in the hip joint, hydraulic fluid geysering as his leg crumpled. The seventh dropped mid-sprint, a smoking hole where his adrenal implant used to be.
The Kenshin clattered to the floor, Carl's unmodified hands trembling from the strain. Meat-and-bone fingers, no reinforced tendons, no shock absorbers—just raw, stubborn grit. Three Maelstrom remained, their optics cycling through threat reassessments. Too late.
Carl's wrists flicked. Twin monowires slithered from hidden ports beneath his sleeves, their single-molecule edges humming with lethal charge. The first wire lashed outward, slicing through a scavenger's reinforced ribcage like foil, his torso sliding cleanly from his hips in a shower of sparks. The second wire snapped horizontally, severing another's arms at the elbows before looping back to carve a crimson smile across his throat. The third Maelstrom froze, his chrome-plated fingers inches from his holster, as the wires crisscrossed in a flash of silver. For a heartbeat, nothing. Then his body slid apart in four symmetrical pieces, each thudding to the floor with mechanical finality.
Carl caught his Kenshin mid-air, the pistol's grip slick with coolant and viscera. Blood pattered against the floor like rain, pooling around sparking cyberlimbs and half-melted firearms. He glanced down at his jacket, now a canvas of arterial spray and synthetic lubricant. "Ugh. Laundry's gonna suck."
Across the room, Blanca stood frozen, her Malorian still smoking in her white-knuckled grip. Her face cycled through emotions like a glitching holo—shock calcifying into awe, then curdling into terror. Her gaze darted from the bisected corpses to Carl's blood-streaked face, his expression as casual as if he'd just finished a shift at a noodle stand.
"Threats eliminated," he said, ejecting the Kenshin's spent mag. "Three more downstairs. Cleanup included?"
Blanca's voice emerged as a fractured whisper. "You… eviscrated them."
"Efficient, right?" Carl grinned, a droplet of blood trailing down his jawline. "No witnesses, no counterattacks. Textbook protection."
She stared at the carnage—a Maelstrom lieutenant's severed head still rolling under the table, its chrome dome flickering with dying LEDs. "I… I just wanted to escape."
Carl blinked. "Escape's for amateurs."
The door burst open. Three Maelstrom scouts charged in, their optics widening at the slaughterhouse tableau. One froze, his Saratoga slipping from his grip. Another backpedaled, boots squealing in pooled blood. The third managed a choked scream before Carl's Kenshin barked once—a harmonic note that vaporized three skulls in unison.
€$50,000 flashed in Carl's vision, the transaction notification glinting amid the carnage. Blanca's shell-shocked whisper cut through the silence:
"You're… terrifying."
Carl wiped blood off his cheek with his sleeve, smearing it into a war-paint streak. "Nah. Just thorough."
He offered her a hand. She recoiled, her polished boots slipping in the gore.
"Suit yourself." He scooped up a Maelstrom shotgun, its barrel still radiating heat. "Next time, maybe don't hire a merc if you want subtlety."
Blanca didn't argue.
Some fears, after all, were rational.